


Roadkill Drive

by TheSkyLarkin



Series: SkyLarkin's Whumptober 2020 Fics [2]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant at the time of writing, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Mentioned Ava Starr, Mentioned Hank Pym, Mentioned Hope Van Dyne, Mentioned Maggie Lang, Mentioned Wombats (MCU), Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Torture, Whump, Whumptober 2020, mentioned cassie lang - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26774206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSkyLarkin/pseuds/TheSkyLarkin
Summary: After the universe doesn't end, Scott Lang faces the consequences of his past actions. Set post-Endgame.Challenge: Whumptober 2020Prompts: No. 2 - “In the Hands of the Enemy" "Kidnapped"No. 3 - “My Way or the Highway” “Manhandled” “Forced to Their Knees” “Held at Gunpoint”No. 16 - “A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” “Forced to Beg”See End Notes for comprehensive warnings/tags
Relationships: Background Scott Lang/Hope Van Dyne, Cassie Lang & Scott Lang
Series: SkyLarkin's Whumptober 2020 Fics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946617
Kudos: 15
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Roadkill Drive

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [1blackstar2](https://1blackstar2.tumblr.com/)/[E_Jones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Jones) and spiraling/[Stormwind13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stormwind13/pseuds/Spiraling) for beta reading!

A lot of things had happened to Scott Lang in the last few years (such as becoming a superhero, reuniting with his daughter, time-traveling through the quantum realm twice, reuniting with his daughter _again_ , and fighting an alien army for the fate of the universe to name a few). Even so, waking up tied up in the trunk of a car was a new experience for him. Consciousness came trickling back slowly at first, then the car hit a bump in the road and sent him flying onto the roof of the trunk without warning. Through the duct tape, Scott let out a muffled scream as a particularly tender part of his head collided with the metal above.

How did he get here? He couldn’t recall. Whoever had stuffed him in here (and _stuffed_ was the right word—he could barely move around) must have knocked him over the head first: that would explain the pulsing pain blooming in his left temple. His wrists and ankles were tightly bound by what Scott could only assume was more duct tape; even if the inside of the trunk wasn’t pitch black, he couldn’t check. Attempting to move his head even a little bit resulted in a fresh jolt of pain coursing through his head.

Gingerly moving as much as he could manage confirmed to Scott that his kidnappers had emptied all of his pockets before tossing him in here, even the secret pockets sewn into his jacket. That meant he had no keys, no multitool, no cellphone, no “fake credit card” folding switchblade that Luis had gotten off his cousin’s wife’s housekeeper’s ex-lover’s uncle in bulk for their company (until Dave, Kurt, and Scott had managed to convince him that it was a bad look for a company called (e)X-Con to be handing out _knives you could theoretically sneak past security_ as a promotional freebie). And none of his Pymtech gadgets, if he’d had anything on him beforehand…

With his limited range of motion, Scott tried to feel around the trunk for a tire changing kit or anything helpful at all, but he was seemingly the sole occupant of this space. He couldn’t even get the duct tape off his mouth; whoever had taken him had wrapped the length of tape around his head a couple of times so tightly that if he didn’t consciously remember to take deep breaths, the edges of his vision would start to blur. Guess someone really wanted him to shut up, huh?

With no other course of action currently available to him, Scott just closed his eyes and listened in the vain hope of discovering some kind of clue as to where he was headed or who had kidnapped him. Judging by the occasional shifting as the car rounded a curve, he guessed that they must be driving down a particularly winding road—probably a highway at the speed they seemed to be going. There was no noise from the other occupants of the car, and the radio was either off or too low to hear from the trunk—a good indication that whoever these people were, they had some sense of professionalism. Possibly.

But who in the world could Scott have pissed off so much that they’d come for him now, especially after having been presumed dead for five years like half of the universe’s population? Dave and Kurt had both sworn on their respective grandmother’s graves that they hadn’t made any enemies and had somehow kept the company running by purely legal means during the interim—the private security industry as a whole had gotten a big boost in business after half of the world’s population had suddenly collapsed into dust (at least for those who had survived the Snap anyway).

Ava had also been taken by the Snap, so she and Bill Foster were friendly towards him and the Pyms (mostly) now that her quantum instability issues had been addressed. So that ruled them out as potential suspects. And unless things had changed drastically in five years, this wasn’t the FBI’s M.O. either. Plus, Scott would like to think that he was in better standing with the feds now, especially after helping to defeat Thanos and all that.

But without Hank’s gadgets and the suit, he wasn’t much of an Avenger, was he? Just an ex-convict with a Master’s in engineering and a lot of bad luck.

Not that difficult of a person to make disappear for good.

There was a sharp screech of the tires as the car jerked sideways again, and Scott reflexively curled up in anticipation of smacking his head against the roof again. These roads must still be wet from the rain earlier...

Suddenly, the memories from earlier that evening finally came back to him: he and the guys had been arguing about dinner (Kurt and Luis wanted dumplings from Lucky Liu’s, Scott had argued that the place wasn’t even really Chinese—it was owned by a guy named Gary White—and there were better options). Scott had lost that argument—and the following coin toss—so he’d reluctantly headed out into the pouring rain. That would explain the current dampness of his clothing and why he didn’t have any of his Ant-Man gear on hand: who would be anticipating getting jumped by some goons on a takeout run to a dive three blocks away from your office in a downpour?

The weather also explained why Hope and her folks hadn’t appeared to stage a gallant rescue yet: Hank’s security network of ants tended to stay indoors during a rainstorm, for obvious reasons. So unless the Pyms had injected him with a micro-tracker while he wasn’t looking, they wouldn’t know where to find him either.

Plus, Scott recalled that the whole Pym-Van Dyne family had gone to some important quantum physics conference in Eastern Europe this week (which Hank had been grumbling about for _months_ now but when Hope had suggested that he just not attend if he was going to be complaining the entire time, her father retorted that he refused to let some guy named Von Doom—who wasn’t even an accredited doctor!—show him up), hence him having dinner with just the guys tonight…

…since Cassie hadn’t been around either. Ever since he’d gotten back to California after the battle with Thanos, Scott’s daughter had been discreetly avoiding him, citing school and “teenage girl stuff” (whatever that meant). Her mother and stepfather weren’t sure what was up with her either, but Cassie had sworn that she wasn’t mad at any of them for disappearing in the Snap and Scott couldn’t think of any other plausible reasons for her to be upset at him. (Heck, _he_ was pretty upset at him for missing another _five whole years_ of his daughter’s life, and it wasn’t even his fault this time!)

Maggie had advised him to just let her be for now, that their daughter would be able to deal with whatever was bugging her on her own and if not was smart enough to ask for help. Scott could only hope that she was right.

If Scott didn’t have the faintest clue as to who would kidnap him, it wasn’t very likely that Luis, Dave, or Kurt would either. The feds weren’t actively keeping tabs on him anymore (too many _actual_ dangerous individuals had cropped up during the five years for them to pay any more attention to boring old him anymore). And he hadn’t spoken to any of the surviving Avengers since Stark’s funeral…

Scott’s vision began to swim again so he forced himself to take some deep breaths. Everything was going to work out, he’d gotten himself out of worse situations before… No relevant examples were coming to mind at the moment, but he was _sure_ he had! And if these guys _really_ wanted him dead, they wouldn’t have bothered with the whole kidnapping operation: they would have taken him out on the street and disposed of his body elsewhere. So, clearly _someone_ needed him alive for _something_.

Right?

* * *

Without warning, the driver slammed on the brakes. Scott felt every bit of gravel that crunched loudly under the tires as the car came to a screeching halt by the side of the road. He grit his teeth as the cacophony and judder sent a fresh spike of pain through his head. Once it had passed, he couldn’t help but notice that the engine was still rumbling even as the car’s chassis rebounded slightly with the change in weight as at least two passengers exited. That was all the warning that Scott got before the trunk was thrown open and he was roughly yanked out.

The people who were apparently responsible for kidnapping him looked like the most generic well-built henchmen in suits ever, as if their employer had put out a Craigslist ad (wait, was Craigslist still a thing anymore after these five years? Scott couldn’t remember) specifically asking for non-descript looking people, then handpicked the ones who were most likely to melt into the background if they ever found themselves in a police lineup. They tossed him unceremoniously on the ground and the car took off down the highway Scott didn’t recognize (from his current position) the moment the trunk had been slammed shut again.

“Get up,” one of the henchmen barked at him. With the duct tape tightly wrapped around his head, Scott could only flail his similarly heavily duct-taped legs at the henchman for the ten seconds it took for him and his companion to realize that this request wouldn’t be possible in Scott’s current state. (They clearly hadn’t been hired for their intelligence.) But instead of cutting him free, they instead decided to half-drag, half-carry their prisoner away from the highway and uphill on what appeared to be an abandoned service road.

The half-moon was barely visible through the dissipating rain clouds in the sky above as the night dragged on. The path leveled out and Scott could finally see their intended destination: an abandoned building at the edge of the cliffside overlooking the ocean. It was impossible to tell what the original structure’s purpose had been—although it was most likely a factory of some kind if it had been built this far away from the city, as half of it had already been eroded away into the sea by the wind and the passage of time.

From the outside, the ruined building seemed completely empty. But there were more similarly-dressed henchmen inside with flashlights, waiting to greet Scott’s kidnappers just past the half-collapsed threshold. They wordlessly directed the newcomers to bring their prisoner down a dark hallway and up a rusty flight of stairs, which led up to a high grated metal platform that probably would have overlooked one of the main factory floors back in the day. Now, there was nothing but a long drop into the Pacific Ocean lapping against the cliffside somewhere down in the dark abyss beyond those rusty railings and corroding floor. Scott couldn’t help but shiver as a huge burst of freezing sea air wafted up through the metal grating from down below.

After some time, the metal grating clanked as a group of more nondescript goons in nondescript suits ascended the stairs. They flanked a gruff-faced man with salt and pepper hair and a nasty scar that stretched across his entire face. Some kind of chemical burn by the look of it, and a deliberate one at that; Scott couldn’t help but wince a bit in sympathy as he caught a glimpse of the man’s face.

If Scarface had caught him staring, he didn’t remark upon it. He instead spared the briefest of glances on Scott before he turned to the two goons that had delivered him. Coldly, he asked which one of them was responsible for the excessive amount of duct tape used to restrain their prisoner. Even though there was nothing familiar about his appearance to Scott, there was something recognizable about the man’s voice...

The two goons were clearly confused with this question and hesitant to answer at first. “Well... he _is_ an Avenger, sir, even if he isn’t one of the cool ones,” the henchman on Scott’s right side began. Scott shot him an indignant look in response. “He might’ve had some crazy Ant-power, or—”

That’s all the explanation he managed to give before Scarface pulled out a pistol from his suit jacket and shot him without a word. Scott reflexively ducked as the lifeless body hit the ground in front of him. That had escalated very quickly. The other goon jumped a little, but none of Scarface’s other flunkies reacted in the slightest.

“Get that shit off his face,” Scarface ordered Scott’s remaining kidnapper, with an undercurrent of spiteful elation in his voice. “I want to hear him _beg_ for his life once he realizes what’s going on.”

...who the hell was this guy?

The goon’s hand shook a bit as he cut through the mass of duct tape, but Scott wasn’t all that concerned about a few minor cuts on his face in comparison as he watched the other suited henchmen carry the fresh corpse over to the railing and unceremoniously tossed it into the watery void miles beneath. Talk about an effective first impression.

“Look man, I honest to God have no idea who you are or what you want from me,” Scott blurted out the moment that his mouth was no longer covered in duct tape and he could breathe again. “I think you’ve got the wrong—”

“You don’t recognize me at all, do you, Scott?” Scarface cut right through the start of his half-hearted plea, all of his attention on his confused captive. Scott hadn’t experienced a gaze with so much laser-focused hatred since Hank and Hope had found out about his trip to Germany with the Ant-Man suit. He shook his head silently. “As I thought. Allow me to re-introduce myself then. Eric Kavenaugh, we used to work together—”

“—at VistaCorp,” Scott finished for him as he recalled the name and face of a younger (and much nerdier looking) man rather than the Godfather wannabe that stood in front of him. He’d gotten along well with Eric because it seemed like they were the only two people in the company who weren’t the super-serious tech yuppies that had made up the rest of the workforce. How in the world had the unassuming security technician whom he used to reminisce with about the video games they’d played back in college on their shared lunch breaks become a hardened mob boss or something?

“So… what happened to you?” It was hard to gesture while wrapped up in duct tape like a mummy and shaking slightly (out of equal parts cold air and trepidation), but Scott did his best.

“Oh, don’t you know? _Someone_ hacked the company servers, stole millions of dollars, and then broke into the CEO’s private residence on my shift is what happened!” Kavenaugh snarled, and _someone_ looked away guiltily. “Even after your arrest, Zorick needed someone to take the fall for failing to prevent a high-security breach in order to appease the shareholders. And guess whose head got the chopping block?”

Scott winced. With all that had happened to him since then, the VistaCorp heist felt like a whole other lifetime ago. From what he remembered of his former boss, that unnecessarily pettiness seemed in character for Zorick. But still, surely Eric wasn’t just still hung up on being fired all those years ago? This was San Francisco, where layoffs (especially in the large technology corporations like VistaCorp) were almost a seasonal process. There had to be more to his story.

“With a high profile black mark like that on my resume, no other companies would hire me,” Kavenaugh continued bitterly, the grating underneath his feet groaning as he paced. “After all, who would want to take a chance on the guy who failed to stop “The Modern Day Robin Hood” at VistaCorp? I was falling behind on my bills, and had to resort to a bunch of odd jobs just to get by, especially since Anne had just given birth—”

Scott couldn’t help but grimace at the mention of Kavenaugh’s wife. Ah, right. That had been the _other_ major commonality between them. In contrast to their officemates (who either reveled in their lack of a relationship, loudly lamented their status as single adults and blamed their dating failures on others rather than try to improve themselves as people, or seemed to low-key despise their significant others and children—yet also refused to separate from and stop being miserable sad sacks in suits for the sake of keeping up appearances), Scott was happy to talk about his (at the time) wife and baby girl to anyone who would listen—especially an expectant father who wanted parenting advice since his own abusive childhood hadn’t provided the best examples for him.

Looking back on the heist that had nearly ruined his own life for good, Scott hadn’t even considered any sort of collateral damage for the people outside his own family, had he?

“Eric,” he began sincerely, “for what it’s worth, I am so sorry—”

A right hook to the face cut his apology short and knocked him down onto the cold metal grating. “Oh, are you Scott? Are you really!? Well, that changes everything then!” Kavenaugh roared sardonically. “Do you know how long it took to get my life back together after what you did!?” Scott yowled as an expensive steel-toed shoe walloped him in the ribs hard enough to bruise. Kavenaugh’s onslaught persisted as he continued with his story. 

“I managed to pick up some contracting work from a friend of a friend in the business under the table—security, reconnaissance, wetwork prep, stuff like that. None of it was legal, of course, but I made sure it wasn’t anything that would get me and my family into too much hot water if someone were to find out. I wasn’t proud of doing what I had to do to get by—” He paused to take a breath and aim another kick at Scott’s face before continuing. “—but I was good at it. In time, I’d managed to claw my way out of debt. I nearly turned my life around without anyone suspecting anything… until I slipped up and Anne found out.”

Kavenaugh’s assault stopped, and even through the considerable pain in his chest and face, Scott couldn’t help but feel the tiniest pang of empathy for him. Kavenaugh’s situation was a relatable one to him: he didn’t begrudge Maggie back then for filing for divorce when he’d landed himself a prison sentence. But in retrospect, their marriage had been on the rocks even before the idea for the VistaCorp heist had taken root in his mind.

“After that, she didn’t want anything to do with me.” Kavenaugh had gone back to pacing back and forth, and Scott suppressed a tiny sigh of relief. “She took Sarah with her and moved back in with her folks down south. For years, I tried to convince her that I’d changed—I went straight, got a real job, the whole nine yards. Anything to get her to take me back.” It might have been a pain-induced hallucination, but Scott could’ve sworn he heard one of Kavenaugh’s henchmen make a barely-audible sympathetic noise.

“And then one day out of the blue, she finally agreed to drive up with our daughter back to San Francisco to see me and try to talk things over again. That day just so happened to be May 31st, five years ago.”

Kavenaugh started to get audibly choked up, and Scott had to suppress a shudder as he recognized the significance of that date. May 31st, the day that he’d gotten trapped in the Quantum Realm as half of the world’s population turned to ash in a snap of Thanos’s fingers.

“Anne was driving up with Sarah from San Diego on the Five when all those people started spontaneously turning into dust. A semi that had lost its driver swerved into their lane without warning and totaled the car, killing both of them instantly. In all the ensuing chaos afterwards, it took me a whole month to finally find out what had happened to my family.”

Kavenaugh had to pause again to collect himself. The room was as silent as a graveyard. “I lost everything that day. All that I’d worked for over those years died with my family on that strip of highway. I went back into this line of work, taking on more and more dangerous jobs because I had nothing left to live for.”

For once in his life, Scott doesn’t have a witty retort to give. What the hell could he possibly say to that?

“And do you know the worst part of it all?” Kavenaugh suddenly reached down and forcefully yanked Scott to his knees by a fistful of hair. Scott’s left eye had already been throbbing from the furious ex-security technician’s first punch; with all of the other hits he’d taken, it was definitely going to bruise into a spectacular shiner… if Kavenaugh let him live that long.

“The worst part was when your Avenger buddies only brought back everyone who had been turned to dust. When it happened, I thought that it meant that everyone who had died on that day five years ago—Anne and Sarah included—had come back, until that big green guy got on the news to explain what had really happened. Those few hours of false hope… it was like losing them all over again.”

“Then I saw you—” Kavenaugh grabbed Scott’s hair again, pulling him up so he had no choice but to look Kavenaugh dead in the eyes and witness the abject fury they held within. “—on primetime TV once again, but this time they were calling you a superhero instead of a crook! And I thought to myself, isn’t that funny?” Scott couldn’t help but shake his head at the obviously rhetorical question, his level of concern rising in tandem with the mania that rapidly crept into Kavenaugh’s voice.

“The two of us—both former workers for the same company, both turned to a life of crime for our own reasons. But _you_ get the glory and fame, while I had to lose the only two people in this world I’ve ever cared about!”

With that finally off his chest, Kavenaugh pulled out a pistol from the depths of his suit jacket. Scott didn’t think that there was a way that he could possibly talk himself out of this situation… but he had to try, for Cassie’s sake if nothing else. “Eric, please don’t do this,” Scott began as calmly as he could manage under the circumstances. “I’m sorry for what happened to Anne and Sarah, I really am. But killing me won’t bring them back, or bring you any closure. Come on man, you know this already.”

“Yeah.” Kavenaugh snapped the safety catch off and aimed the gun in one swift, practiced motion. “But honestly? I don’t care.”

Oh God. This was it. This was how Scott Lang was going to die: not saving the world in some glorious fashion, but at the hands of an ex-World of Warcraft player turned mob boss with a grudge in some abandoned factory by the sea. He’d never get to kiss Hope again, or pay Bruce back for that taco he owed him, or show Nebula what Galaga was, or finally win that argument against Luis about how there were only five artists in the history of pop music who were better solo than with a group, and _none_ of them were Paul McCartney...

He wouldn’t even get to say any last words to Cassie…

* * *

“Well, _I_ care.”

One of Kavenaugh’s goons reeled back suddenly as if he’d been punched in the face by someone invisible, or rather someone very small with her strength not proportional to her current size courtesy of Pym Particles. The other henchmen grabbed their weapons but were quickly knocked unconscious one by one as Ava phased in and out of existence, evading all of their bullets and punches effortlessly.

Kavenaugh grabbed Scott by the collar, keeping the gun firmly pointed at his temple, and backed away as Hope shifted to her true size and stalked towards him menacingly. “Let him go, and I’ll let you live,” she growled at Kavenaugh. Scott couldn’t help but wince at her choice of words.

Kavenaugh had gone pale as a ghost, but not the “Ghost” who was effortlessly picking off his best men in the background. “How the hell did you—”

“We injected a micro-tracker into Scott’s spine while he wasn’t looking,” Hope explained flippantly. To Scott’s quizzical look, she added, “My parents are still at the airport in Vienna. We decided it was best to leave the conference early before my Dad accidentally incited World War Three over his bruised ego.”

Behind her, Ava let out a snicker mid-haymaker.

(Scott wanted to interject that his question was more along the lines of, “How the hell did you inject a tracking device _right into my spine_ without me noticing?”. But with the gun still aimed at his head, it didn’t seem like the best time to be pedantic.)

Kavenaugh suddenly stopped dead, and a quick look behind him told Scott why: he’d run out of space. He and the mob boss had been backed up to the edge of the platform where the safety railing had been worn away by rust. The long drop into the ocean lay open behind them like a gaping maw of a roaring beast. Kavenaugh looked around wildly for a way out, then seemed to come to a conclusion. “I’m afraid I can’t comply with your request, Ms. Van Dyne,” he told Hope, finger reaching for the trigger on his pistol again. “H—”

“She wasn’t asking.” Ava was suddenly up in Kavenaugh’s face, phasing the gun right out of his hand. Her sudden appearance out of seemingly nowhere threw him off balance, but he managed to cling on to Scott and keep himself from falling over the edge. The mob boss looked down at the sheer drop behind him, then at Scott…

…then turned his gaze back up to Hope. With a wicked grin, he made sure to lock eyes with her before turning around and shoving Scott off the platform. With a yell, Ava tried to reach out and grab him, but missed by inches—

“I’ve got you!”

A massive hand grabbed Scott in mid-air and pulled him back to the surface, but Hope was standing over an unconscious Kavenaugh next to Ava, still at her normal size. Neither of them seemed surprised in the slightest at the sudden appearance of this new person also equipped with quantum technology. His savior had broken through several of the structure’s walls as they’d grown to their current size in order to snatch him from the void. Scott couldn’t recognize the figure in the new Pymtech suit he hadn’t seen before, at least not until he heard her giggle.

“Wait… Cassie!?” Scott looked up at his not-so-little girl as her helmet retracted into her suit, and Cassie Lang grinned right back at her dad.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Constructive criticism is appreciated!
> 
> Triggers/Warnings: Torture, Death/Mentioned deaths of minor characters, Injuries, Gun


End file.
